Heroes Not Zombies

Are you well? How’s your energy? If I were to ask you to rate both your well-being and your energy on a ten point scale where 0 is the worst level you could imagine and 10 is the best, what numbers would you give me right now? You’re able to do that. Instantly. But how do you do it? You don’t check your blood pressure, your pulse, your blood sugar etc etc. You assess it holistically. It’s not actually possible to reduce your well-being or your energy to any single element. Yes, of course, individual elements play a part. They are factors, and influences. But your well-being cannot be reduced to component parts. The moment we reduce a human being to a part of a human being we don’t know that human being any more. Maybe we can know how much haemoglobin they have in their red blood cells, but we don’t know them.
There’s a similar thing happens when people say to me when someone gets better, what is it that got them better? Patients regularly say after an admission to our hospital that it was “the whole package”, or “the way everything fitted together”, or they’ll say it was the rest, and the physio and the way they were listened to, and…and….and. It’s not reducible.
What’s our obsession with breaking things down into pieces? According to Ian McGilchrist it’s because our left hemisphere works that way. It abstracts, selects, and then re-presents information to us. Our right hemisphere however processes the world more holistically. Its main focus is the world as it is, without filtering, selecting and re-presenting.
The moment we select only a part of something, we see only what we’ve selected. Some people seem to think if you examine a part of the whole you’ll get closer to the truth. Actually, you get further away.
Maybe it’s time we engaged our right hemispheres more, and quieted down that noisy, rather arrogant left hemisphere.
Health is not reducible to component parts.
Human beings are not reducible to component parts, not even genes.
We should stop treating patients as if they are only the containers of parts, and deluding ourselves into believing we know exactly what produces healing and wellbeing. We don’t.